Video: Ed Miliband hits out at Daily Mail over 'smear' of his dead father as Cameron and Clegg offer support to Labour leader

David Cameron and Nick Clegg rallied around Ed Miliband today after a national newspaper attacked the Labour leader’s dead father.

Both the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister said they supported Mr Miliband’s defence of his father Ralph’s name, after an article in the Daily Mail branded him “The Man Who Hated Britain”.

Ralph Miliband was a renowned socialist academic, but the Mail piece argued he was a radical whose views would “disturb everyone who loves this country”.

On Sky News today Mr Cameron said: “All I know is if anyone had a go at my father I would want to respond very vigorously. There’s not a day goes by when you don’t think about your dad and all that he meant to you, so I completely understand why Ed would want to get his own point of view across.”

Angered: Labour leader Ed Miliband has slammed The Daily Mail for their 'character assassination' on his dead father
Mr Clegg used Twitter to say: “I support Ed Miliband defending his dad. Politics should be about playing the ball, not the man, certainly not the man’s family.”

After complaints from the Labour leader the Mail stood by its piece, but agreed to print a rebuttal from Mr Miliband. He wrote: “Fierce debate about politics does not justify character assassination of my father, questioning the patriotism of a man who risked his life ... in the Second World War, or publishing a picture of his gravestone with a tasteless pun about him being a ‘grave socialist’.

“The Daily Mail sometimes claims it stands for the best of British values of decency. But something has really gone wrong when it attacks the family of a politician in this way.”

Ralph Miliband, who died in 1994 aged 70, was born to Polish-Jewish migrants in Belguim and came to Britain in 1940, fleeing the Nazis. In 1943 he joined the Royal Navy and did three years’ service.

A Daily Mail spokesman said: "We ask fair-minded people to read our editorial today. For what this episode confirms is that you cannot allow politicians anywhere near regulating the press.

"While we respect Mr Miliband's right to defend his father - and he has done so in the Daily Mail today - it is worth stressing that Ralph Miliband wasn't an ordinary private individual but a prominent academic and author who devoted his life to promoting a Marxist dogma which caused so much misery in the world. He hated such British institutions as the Queen, the Church and the Army, and wanted a workers' revolution. Our readers have a right to know that.

"Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, is the leading advocate of statutory controls of the press in Britain under which politicians could ultimately decide what appears in newspapers.

"His father - to whom he constantly refers in his speeches - was a proponent of one of the world's most poisonous political doctrines under which freedom of expression was crushed and newspapers controlled by governments."